Professionalism of a Coder

Earlier in this course, I talked about professionalism, and I described it as follows:

Professionalism is about fulfilling the promises you make to other teams.

Now that we are speaking about coding, let us agree on actions that developers need to take to be professionals. I am not trying to play a blame game even though it might seem so; instead, I want to influence positive changes. I am a hands-on engineer, and I have met many kinds of specialists, so I know what I am talking about.

Developers often write in their resumes the skills that they do not have; they also claim techniques that they do not follow. We must stop acting in this way by either setting the right expectations or improving our skills.

One example is a popular Test-Driven Development technique (TDD). Every other engineer has this exercise in their profile, but they fail to demonstrate it in action after they join a company.

Another example is writing unit tests. I have met many engineers who said that they wrote unit tests until somebody noticed that they did not.

There is no excuse for claiming mentioned techniques falsely, as they are easy to master. You can take action and become a professional by learning skills that you think you should have.